Thursday, 31 May 2012

As I was writing it, I hesitated over the word being, before playing safe with the uncontroversial (ˈ) biːɪŋ. The reason is that I tend to relax the first vowel in this word, producing something more like (ˈ)bɪ(ː)ɪŋ. I can do the same with the phonetically comparable seeing, freeing, agreeing etc., and across word boundaries in phrases such as three in a row, three exams. In fact I can optionally do this whenever iː is followed by another vowel. This process (or ‘rule’) is optional and variable, presumably influenced by stylistic factors that I cannot quite pin down.

It’s a special case of the general process I call ‘smoothing’, of which more familiar examples are pronunciations such as faə, paə for ˈfaɪə, ˈpaʊəfire, power. I describe it pretty gnomically in LPD in the note on Compression.

Logically, I think we need to distinguish smoothing (= laxing of a tense high vowel, or loss of the second element of a diphthong) from compression (= reduction of two syllables to one). In any given instance you might theoretically have one or the other or both or neither; but I have always been sceptical about the possibility of compression without smoothing (e.g. monosyllabic faɪə, with a putative phonetic triphthong), although other writers seem to accept triphthongs as a possibility in English with little hesitation.

Thus beingˈbiː.ɪŋ can alternatively be ˈbɪ.ɪŋ (smoothed) or bɪːŋ (smoothed and compressed), but hardly monosyllabic *biːɪŋ, just as fireˈfaɪ.ə can become ˈfa.ə or faə (or the further derived faː), but in my view can hardly be monosyllabic *faɪə.

There’s an issue how best to transcribe the smoothed form of the underlying long vowel or diphthong: do we write it with length marks (as I did in AofE) or without (as I do in LPD and here)? How do I transcribe smoothed throwing? ˈθrəɪŋ, ˈθrəːɪŋ or ˈθrɜːɪŋ? What do we do if slower ends up sounding identical to slurslɜː, as it may? Where’s my lawn ‘myrrh’?

We normally transcribe RP theory as ˈθɪəri, since it’s an exact rhyme of drearyˈdrɪəri and wearyˈwɪəri. But I suppose that underlyingly it is (or was) ˈθiːəri, and that in this case the smoothing plus compression has been lexicalized.

This whole discussion applies, I think, only to RP and certain local accents of England, and in particular to varieties such as Norfolk. Probably wisely, when teaching EFL we don’t mention anything beyond at most the fire, power types.

Wednesday, 30 May 2012

With the Eurovision Song Contest being held in the capital of Azerbaijan, we had ample opportunity last weekend to hear how people pronounced the name Baku.

In LPD I gave it as (ˌ)bɑːˈkuː, with an alternative bæ-.

What the British TV and radio presenters actually said was usually ˈbækuː.

If the account of Azeri (Azerbaijani) in Wikipedia is to be believed, native words in that language do not have k, which appears only in borrowings “from Russian or French”. The letter k generally corresponds rather to a palatal plosive c. In Azeri Baku is actually spelt Bakı, with a Turkish-style dotless i at the end denoting a close unrounded back vowel, and (according to Wikipedia) is pronounced correspondingly as bɑˈcɯ.

In English, I guess Americans would usually still go for bɑːˈkuː. I wonder what Brits in the oil business who have dealings with Azerbaijan say? Probably they too, like the TV presenters, prefer ˈbækuː, and that’s what I ought to give in LPD as the British anglicized form.

Unlike ordinary Turkish, the related Azeri has two open vowels: not only a back ɑ but also a front æ. Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, when Azeri was still written in the Cyrillic alphabet, this vowel required an extra non-Russian letter. The one chosen was visually like a schwa, Әә, and this has been carried over into the Latin-letter script used nowadays, as Əə (blog, 15 August 2006).

_ _ _

On a different issue, I wrote on Monday about the ˈɡlæsiəz or (compressed) ˈɡlæsjəz we’d seen and walked on. Our tour guides both on the coach trip and on the cruise were of course north American, so they called them ˈɡleɪʃɚz. It was interesting to observe our all-Brit group hesitating between our own usual pronunciation and the different model put in front of us by our authoritative guides.

Tuesday, 29 May 2012

Shortly after my return from Canada I had to examine a PhD thesis, which required me to read it thoroughly, and it was 900 pages long. That’s why there was a few days’ delay before I restarted this blog. I was the external examiner, and the viva took place in Cardiff, three hours away by train for me.

It must be getting on for twenty years since I last visited Cardiff, and as you would imagine there have been various changes. One of them is linguistic: not only is the public signage now much more systematically bilingual than the half-hearted attempts I remember from earlier visits, but all the announcements over the public address system at Cardiff Central station (that’s Caerdydd Canolog) are now given first in Welsh, then in English.

As I was preparing to return to London after the viva (the candidate passed, you’ll be glad to hear), there was a problem. Because of a herd of cows reportedly having wandered onto the line at Sain Ffagan/St Fagans, trains coming from the west had to be diverted and my return journey was delayed by over half an hour. So I got to listen to a lot of bilingual announcements.

And I discovered a new Welsh-English false friend. Mae’r trên hwn wedi’i ddileu, said the announcer, or words to that effect. The Welsh word dileu is pronounced diˈlei, as near as dammit identically with the English word delay. Unthinkingly, I mentally translated ‘this train has been delayed’.

But my mental translation was wrong. The meaning of dileu is not ‘delay’ but ‘cancel’ (in this context, that is — it can also mean ‘get rid of, abolish, delete’). The announcement duly continued, in English, This service has been cancelled.

I would never have confused Welsh dileu and English delay in writing, only in speech. So this pair are what we might call ‘phonetic false friends’.

All of us who have studied one or more foreign languages are familiar with the notion of a false friend. For most of the ‘faux amis’ I remember from school French lessons it was the written form on which we concentrated: actuel doesn’t mean ‘actual’ (but rather ‘present, current, topical’), though if you heard aktɥɛl you’d hardly think the speaker had said ˈæktʃuəl.

German Gift, on the other hand, is not only a written false friend of English gift but also a phonetic one, since both are pronounced ɡɪft. (The German word means ‘poison’.)

I suppose you could say that French choix ‘choice’ is a phonetic false friend of English schwa, since both are pronounced ʃwɑ (with perhaps some leeway in the precise quality and length of the vowel). But no one would ever confuse them in writing.

Likewise, for us non-rhotic speakers German Bahn ‘path, track, railway’ is a phonetic false friend of English barn. But no one literate is going to confuse them.

What are the conditions under which we need to be on the lookout for phonetic-only false friends?

Friday, 4 May 2012

The OED’s first citation for phoneme in its modern sense is dated 1896. As the n-gram shows, though, it was only in the 1950s that this term really took off, reaching a peak around 1970. It was in 1968 that Chomsky and Halle’s The Sound Pattern of English was published, the first widely influential publication to rubbish the whole notion of the phoneme as the basis of phonological analysis (though Jones’s great SOAS rival Firth had attacked it years before). This explains the abrupt decline of the term after that date.

The OED records only one instance of the popular misuse of the term ‘phoneme’ to mean nothing more than ‘speech sound’, often encountered among speech and language therapists, language teachers, and drama teachers. That is from the novelist Kingsley Amis.

The graph shows allophone coming into use around 1940. The OED’s first citation, from Benjamin Lee Whorf, is dated 1938. Daniel Jones seems to have used the term only very rarely, speaking rather of ‘sounds’, the ‘grouping of sounds into phonemes’, and the ‘members’ of a phoneme.

The only case I have found of Jones using the term ‘allophone’ is in The Phoneme: its Nature and Use, §24.

When a phoneme comprises more than one member, it generally happens that one of the sounds seems more important than the other(s). … Such a sound may be termed the “principal member” or “norm” of the phoneme. The other sounds in the same phoneme may be called “subsidiary members” or “subsidiary allophones”.

The American structuralists were always clear that all the members of a phoneme are its allophones: the phoneme comprises its allophones. Phonemes are realized or manifested as their allophones. Nevertheless, students often suppose that the principal member is the phoneme, and that the allophones are what replace it in particular environments. This misunderstanding is encouraged by definitions such as Potter’s (1957):

Robins (for whom I used to write linguistics essays when I was a postgraduate) explains the orthodox position much more clearly.

Although many modern phonologists routinely pooh-pooh the notion of the phoneme, there seems to be no satisfactory replacement term or concept for us to use in its stead.

Thursday, 3 May 2012

Yesterday’s Sun newspaper reported Roy Hodgson’s appointment as manager for the England football team with this headline.

That is, Bring on the Euros (the European football championships), supposedly as pronounced by the new manager.

The Sun’s story continued “We’ll see you in Ukwaine against Fwance”.

It is gratifying to see that this mocking of Hodgson’s pronunciation has led to numerous complaints and to the Football Association condemning the headline as ‘unacceptable’.

The FA and the Press Complaints Commission have today received a large number of objections relating to the front page headline in the Sun newspaper, regarding Roy Hodgson’s manner of speech.
On this occasion, we will not be making an official complaint to the PCC but we have raised it with the newspaper and made it clear that their front page is unacceptable to us.

The FA Chairman, David Bernstein, said:

We are delighted at the media response to Roy’s appointment but are disappointed with the headline in the Sun, which we consider is in poor taste and disrespectful.

The Sun now claims that Hodgson is “affectionately known as Woy due to his speech impediment”.

However, Hodgson does not have an r-sound like Sir Peter Tapsell’s. If you actually listen to his voice you will notice that his articulation of r is not particularly labial and certainly not w-like. It is more of a velar approximant, ɰ.

But the criticism remains: no one, and particularly not journalists, should mock the afflicted. We can gently mock Ken Livingstone for being a newt-lover, or Donald Trump for his improbable combover. But we wouldn’t poke fun at someone who was blind or disabled. Equally, we oughtn’t to laugh at someone for their idiosyncratic pronunciation.

Wednesday, 2 May 2012

Commenting on Monday’s blog, Mark Leavitt mentioned being misled by the spelling of the word epitome, which caused him to pronounce it “eppy-tohm”, i.e. ˈepɪtəʊm, instead of the usual ɪˈpɪtəmi. Greek ἐπιτομή has four syllables.

I hope he was indeed ˌmɪsˈled rather than being ˈmɪzl̩d.

I can remember once doing a double-take after misreading seabed (the ocean floor) as siːbd. Not to mention ɪnˈfreəd (infrared) rays.

Along with epitome we might mention apocope (Gk ἀποκοπή) and syncope (Gk συγκοπή). I have heard -strəʊf in apostrophe and catastrophe, but only as jocular intentional mispronunciations.

Some of you may have been puzzled on seeing sundried tomatoes on the shelf at the supermarket. Nothing to do with sundry, not ˈsʌndrid: they’re sun-dried, ˈsʌn draɪd.

I suppose the best-known case of a spelling pronunciation of this kind is seeing the word awry and saying it aloud as ˈɔːri. Strangely enough, the only word with orthographic awry actually pronounced ɔːri, as a model, seems to be outlawry, hardly an everyday word.

Pronouncing awry as ˈɔːri rather than as əˈraɪ is not a malapropism, since it does not involve the confusion of one word with another. I don’t think we have a particular term for this kind of thing, such as would enable us to distinguish the awry type from run-of-the-mill spelling pronunciations such as often with a t, falcon with an l, or Antigua with a w.

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Do you know of any English word, however obscure, in which <au> in the spelling has the sound of aʊ as in the proper name Faust?

After a little thought, and consulting Carney’s Survey of English Spelling, I replied as follows.

Lots of people say traumatic with the MOUTH vowel, though others use the THOUGHT vowel. The same applies to various other words of Greek origin (claustrophobia, glaucoma, tau, and trauma itself). You also sometimes get the MOUTH vowel in aural, to keep it distinct from oral. Then there are the actual German borrowings such as meerschaum, sauerkraut, as well as names such as Audi, Schopenhauer, Strauss, like the Faust you mention. There are also geographical names such as Nauru, Palau. And some people use this diphthong, wrongly, in Welsh Blaenau, Dolgellau.

I might also have mentioned other more or less exotic borrowings from various languages, such as luau. And of course there are Latin words: magna cum laude, gaudeamus igitur.

Faust itself has a derived adjective Faustian, as when we say a Faustian bargain. This, of course, is not a German word: the German equivalent is faustisch. So it has to be counted English.

But apart from these, as far as I can see, there are no pukka, echt, authentic native English words with <au> = indubitable aʊ.

I hope my correspondent was satisfied with the answer. Disappointingly, like so many who consult me by email, he didn’t even do me the courtesy of acknowledging my reply.